publishedmedium:washington post

  • 1968 riots: Four days that reshaped Washington, D.C. - Washington Post

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/dc-riots-1968

    On April 4, 1968, the country was still reeling from racial tensions that had sparked deadly riots the year before in Detroit and Newark. But the capital city was said to be special. Some whites called it “the colored man’s paradise.” For thousands of blacks, there was a darker side to paradise, one where humiliation, poverty, segregation and discrimination had accumulated for a century.

    Then, shortly after 8 p.m., word reached the District that the Rev. #Martin_Luther_King Jr. had been slain in Memphis. His assassination ignited an explosion of rioting, looting and burning that stunned Washington and would leave many neighborhoods in ruins for 30 years.

    #états-unis #émeutes_urbaines #urban_matter

  • A proposed method for triangulation of rogue IMSI catchers (a.k.a. “Stingray” devices)
    https://hackernoon.com/a-proposed-method-for-triangulation-of-rogue-imsi-catchers-a-k-a-stingra

    Stingrays are on the loose in Washington D.C.It has been widely reported this week (AP, NPR, Washington Post, BBC) that Washington D.C. and other undisclosed cities are exhibiting anomalies that appear to be due to unauthorized and unknown IMSI catchers (such as the notorious “stingray” devices). These #spying devices are often used by law enforcement to track individuals, intercept texts, and listen to calls. (The ACLU keeps an updated list of federal agencies known to employ IMSI catchers for domestic #surveillance.)The suspected existence of rogue IMSI catchers with unknown operators in American cities was disclosed in a letter (and its attachment) from the Department of Homeland Security to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, dated 26-March 2018.The letter acknowledges that the “use of IMSI (...)

    #imsi-catcher #cell-phones #stingray

  • Momies demi-frères (par la mère) une même étude (ci-dessous, accessible) des compte-rendus quasi similaires à quelques différences mineures (!) près sur l’interprétation…

    The kinship of two 12th Dynasty mummies revealed by ancient DNA sequencing - ScienceDirect
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X17305631

    Highlights
    • We study the kinship of two high-status Egyptians from the 12th Dynasty
    • Ancient DNA was extracted from the teeth of the two mummies
    • Sequences were obtained after hybridization capture of mtDNA and Y chromosome DNA
    • Both mummies belong to mt haplotype M1a1, suggesting a maternal relationship
    • Y DNA sequences showed variations, indicating that the mummies had different fathers
    […]
    4. Discussion
    […]
    Our results provide an intriguing insight into one facet of ancient Egyptian kinship, and illustrate the potential use of matrimonial alliance as a means of social reinforcement among the elite and sub-elite. Unfortunately, placing our results in a broader context is difficult because we are unaware of any comparable examples of two men buried together in an intact Pharaonic tomb (e.g. Garstang, 1907). There is a separate suggestion of #polyandry in the inscriptions on another set of monuments from the same period as the Two Brothers, although these may refer to two women with the same name rather than the same woman having two husbands (Simpson, 1974). The kinship of Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht also provides an example of the common practice in recorded filiations of this period to give precedence to the maternal rather than paternal line, individual rights being determined by social class rather than gender (Robins, 1993), and can perhaps be looked on as a reflection of the high status accorded to their mother Khnum-Aa in their particular social and family structure.

    ======================

    Compte-rendu 1 Live Science

    4,000-Year-Old Mummies Are Half-Brothers, DNA Analysis Shows
    https://www.livescience.com/61448-mummies-are-half-brothers.html
    https://img.purch.com/h/1000/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA5Ny84MjYvb3JpZ2luY

    The two mummies had identical mitochondrial profiles, [so] we can be sure they were related maternally,” the study’s lead researcher, Konstantina Drosou, a research associate at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. “For the Y chromosome, the results were less complete due to the fact that the Y chromosome exists in only one copy per cell, whereas the mitochondrial DNA exists in multiple copies per cell.” [In Photos: Ancient Egyptian Tombs Decorated with Creatures]

    Even so, the Y chromosome results indicated that the two men likely had different fathers.

    Même mère, pères différents, POINT.

    ==========================
    Compte-rendu 2 Washington Post
    4,000-year-old Egyptian mummies were thought to be brothers. Genetics tells a different story. - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/19/4000-year-old-egyptian-mummies-were-thought-to-be-brothers-genetics-

    Khnum-Nakht and Nakht-Ankh were not royalty. Each was the son of a local governor, according to the hieroglyphics. A governor was “basically the headman of the local town, making them elite,” said Campbell Price, the curator of Egypt at the Manchester Museum who worked with Drosou on the new research. “Most people were farmers, remember.

    Price said the discovery suggests an underemphasized aspect of this culture: the role of women in Egyptian high society. Khnum-aa, a member of the “highest social circles,” probably had a son with one local ruler and then, two decades later, had a son with another. “Perhaps,” he wondered, “the male local governors were only able to confirm or maintain their power by marrying this woman called Khnum-aa?

    Réévaluation du rôle social de la femme.
    Pères différents mais successifs : two decades later.

    =======================
    Compte-rendu 3 Les Cahiers de Science & Vie, n° 173, mars 2018, p. 8 (pas de version en ligne)

    Mais, surprise !, les frères ne l’étaient qu’à moitié : " Chose rare, nous avons pu récupérer de l’ADN issu du chromosome Y, donc paternel, poursuit la chercheuse. Cette fois, les variations mesurées indiquent des pères probablement différents. "

    Écart indélicat de madame ? En fait, la découverte éclaire d’anciennes inscriptions «  qui, à l’époque, font plus souvent référence à la mère qu’au père, Indique Konstantina Drosou. _Ici les pères de Khnoum-Nakht et Nakht-Ankh avaient tous les deux un haut statut et partageaient une épouse… Il semble que la femme avait alors une position clé.  »

    Ces données génétiques ont donc une réelle portée sociologique.

    Réévaluation du statut social de la femme et #polyandrie (possible…) sans le dire trop explicitement : partageaient une épouse.

  • Mass shooting statistics in the United States - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-shootings-in-america

    The Parkland, Fla., school shooting is a developing story and information is incomplete.

    The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

    Related

    The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

    Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

    There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the 150 shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

    #états-unis #armes #armement #meurtre_de_masse #massacre

  • How the “Heart Balm Racket” Convinced America That Women Were Up to No Good | History | Smithsonian
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-heart-balm-racket-convinced-america-women-were-no-good-180968144

    By Tori Telfer
    smithsonian.com
    February 13, 2018

    She was 27, with a “winning smile” and a penchant for hanging around ocean liners. He was 45, a widower with an 18-year-old daughter, and they were sailing to Europe for the summer. The two girls became fast friends and spent a delightful trip together, innocent as could be.

    But all along, this “Siren on Ocean Liner”—as the Washington Post called her—was plotting. After traveling through Europe with the family, the woman, also referred to as Myrtle MaGee by the papers, visited them back in the States (where she secretly destroyed all the letters she’d written to the widower’s daughter, effectively erasing the platonic nature of her relationship to the family). She then blithely launched a lawsuit against the widower, claiming that he had promised to marry her and was now trying to back out of it.

    This case, reported breathlessly by the Washington Post in 1915, was not an isolated incident. In fact, it was only one in a long line of scandalous, seedy, and over-reported cases in which unscrupulous women tried to blackmail wealthy men out of large sums of money, helped along by a weird little piece of legislation that allowed people to sue their exes after a broken engagement. These ladies were “gold-diggers,” “schemers” and “adventuresses,” and what they were doing, the papers crowed, was nothing short of a racket.

    The legislation in question was something called the “breach of promise” or “heart balm” suit, and it was based on the premise that an engagement was a binding contract between two people. If one person were to break off the contract without consulting the other, the law could step in and award damages to the brokenhearted party.

    Granted, no one was terribly happy about these laws in the first place—feminists thought they made women look dependent, while misogynists thought they allowed women to tap into their naturally devious natures—but as controversial, high-profile breach of promise suits kept making the papers, the public grew increasingly paranoid about the implications of such legislation. By 1935, the paranoia had grown so extreme that lawmakers were calling for a wholesale elimination of heart balm laws, and soon enough states were abolishing them right and left—abolishing them so quickly, in fact, that the constitutionality of some of the reform statues was later called into question. Still, the message had been made clear: it was no longer possible to sue over a shattered heart, real or false.

    The idea that people should be punished for trying to back out of an engagement was nothing new in 1935. For centuries, it was possible to take action—first through the church, and then in the courtroom—against the one who loved and left you. (The earliest successful breach of promise suit took place in 1638; men could—and occasionally did—sue their ex-fiancées, but the legislation was mostly used by women.) Opponents of these suits mocked them as either “blackmail or vulgarity unspeakable,” but there was nothing silly or saccharine about the underlying premise, at least not at first. For most of human history, marriage was an extraordinarily practical arrangement, one with significant financial and social benefits, especially for women. Getting engaged meant you could start anticipating those benefits—and you might change your actions accordingly. You might, for example, begin spending money on an expensive trousseau. You might enjoy a change in social status. You would almost certainly break it off with all other marriage prospects. And you might finally decide to sleep with your fiancéé.

    A bride’s virginity was still a pretty big deal in the 1920s and 1930s (and remained that way until at least the 1950s), but engagement provided something of a loophole. Women who were intent on remaining virgins until marriage might consider engagement close enough—and so, if their fiancé suddenly broke things off, they found themselves dealing with a literal drop in value. A broken engagement didn’t just mean a loss of future income, but it could damage a woman’s reputation and make it harder for her to get engaged again. Even if she’d never actually had sex, there was a chance she’d be tainted by association.

    Into this land of hearts and hymens, the law strode bravely. These heart balm laws were unusual, to say the least: no matter how many times you argued financial loss, or tried to put virginity into a legal box, the core of these suits was something uncomfortably personal. “Clearly the principal ground of the action is disappointed hope, and the injury complained of is a violation of faith,” wrote one lawyer in 1906.

    The question was how to turn “disappointed hope” and “violation of faith” into cold hard cash. Juries found themselves compensating plaintiffs for things like, “loss of social and worldly advancement,” “disappointment and incidental suffering,” injury to future marriage prospects, and even emotions like experiencing humiliation “in the social circles in which she moves.” The fact that these compensations all seemed to rely on “emotional sympathy and moral indignation,” as another lawyer wrote in 1935, made some people uncomfortable—especially as all-male juries seemed to be passing down awfully lucrative settlements when the plaintiff was a very pretty woman and the defendant was a very rich man.

    Naturally, these lucrative settlements—with their whiff of sex and drama—were big news, especially when women were walking out of the courtroom with $100,000, $200,000, or even $450,000 from their former suitors. This wasn’t justice, the papers said. This wasn’t restitution. This was a racket—a heart balm racket. And they weren’t entirely wrong.

    ********

    “Fair Sirens Who Seek to Blackmail Rich Men Weave Cunning Webs Which Enmesh Innocent in Hopeless Tangle,” crowed that Washington Post report on that “Siren on Ocean Liner” and all sorts of other nefarious females who used the slipperiness of heart balm laws to con upstanding men out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The article claimed that female blackmailers were lurking around restaurants, cafes, hotels and other affluent watering holes, where they would pick up wealthy, unsuspecting men, go on a few dates with them (ensuring that they’d be spotted by witnesses or even secretly photographed), and then slap them with a breach of promise suit. As far as the innocent widower from the ocean liner? Upon receiving notice of the lawsuit against him, the article reported that he was “stunned almost out of his senses.”

    Polite society, too, was stunned out of their senses by the idea that women with winning smiles were wreaking havoc on men with the aid—nay, with the blessing of the legal system. These dodgy lawsuits played perfectly on people’s fears, tapping into the worst possible clichés of the battle of the sexes: dumb men seduced into trouble, wicked women using their looks for evil. It wasn’t that people thought all jilted women were evil; they just thought that innocent women didn’t sue.

    “A woman whose heart is really broken doesn’t take it into court,” wrote the popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix in 1915, and this sentiment was shared by many. A woman shrewd enough to save love letters as future evidence surely wasn’t the bruised, delicate flower she claimed to be.

    To be fair, the public’s hysteria had some basis in reality. A particularly bold lady blackmailer who went by the name Chicago May ran so many heart balm rackets that she boasted about them in her 1928 memoir. One involved a wealthy suitor who started sending her dirty drawings out of nowhere—the perfect evidence for a fake heart balm suit. (“The drawing was fairly good, but the subject matter was revolting,” she noted.) At one point, she was even conducting her blackmail business intercontinentally: living in London but occasionally popping back over to New York to check up on a heart balm racket or two. She referred to these as her “American investments.”

    Still, the angry editorials and cries for abolishment were mostly fueled by paranoia, not practicality. “Reading the editorials…one would conclude that there had seldom been an actual contract of engagement to marry that was unjustifiably broken,” one lawyer wrote in the Fordham Law Review. “The experience of practicing lawyers is decidedly otherwise.” It was “undue newspaper publicity,” another lawyer argued in the Michigan Law Review, that led to this impassioned public outcry against breach of promise suits. While there were plenty of ordinary suits led by ordinary jilted women (and occasionally a jilted man), it was the sleazy, salacious, high-profile cases that convinced people that these breach of promise laws had to go, and go fast.

    It wasn’t just the sleaziness that bothered people, though. Women’s roles were changing, and the core premise behind the breach of promise laws—that a broken engagement could wreck a woman’s future—was weakening. A woman dumped by her fiancé in 1930 wasn’t ruined the way she might have been a mere generation earlier. “There are many, many ways in which a girl can now earn her own living,” one journalist noted in The Hartford Courant. By the mid-1930s, public sympathy for the brokenhearted had mostly drained away, and the breach of promise suit was on its deathbed.

    ********

    In 1935, a young state legislator named Roberta West Nicholson introduced an anti-heart balm bill in Indiana. Other states quickly followed her lead, and by 1945, 16 states had abolished the breach of promise laws. Today, only a few jurisdictions still cling to them. (You’ll have to move to, say, North Carolina if you want to sue an ex-fiancé.)

    Some violently opposed Nicholson’s bill—one senator noted that it removed women’s civil rights “against philanderers and men who prey upon them.” Others praised her, while misunderstanding her reasons for writing the bill. To this day, certain men’s rights activists love Nicholson for leading the charge against what they see as a war on men; an “Anti-Misandry Legislator,” they call her. The irony is that Nicholson wrote the bill not to protect men, but because she thought women were better than heart balm. “I was pretty young and didn’t realize at first I was challenging a basic common law, that the woman was a chattel and that the man, in marrying her, was saying, ‘I buy you and agree to feed and clothe you,’” she told a journalist decades later. “I was an early woman’s libber and didn’t know it.”

    Yes, the outcry against the so-called heart balm racket wasn’t just from people convinced that unscrupulous women were abusing the system. There was an odd feminism to it. “It is gallantry gone to seed,” wrote Dix. “Moreover, it is not justice, for a woman capable of bringing suit is perfectly able to take care of herself in a love affair or any other business deal.”

    Where once marriage was something that gave women some semblance of power, now—the critics said—women had power of their own, married or not. They could make their own money. They could work on their own American investments. They were no longer defenseless, and so they did not need the law to defend them. In the midst of all the paranoia about blackmail and “vulgarity unspeakable,” a surprisingly modern portrait of marriage was emerging: a union of two people who could make up their own minds about each other and didn’t need the law to save them from themselves.

  • « Too many pills »
    https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/too-many-pills

    Drug overdoses now are the leading cause of death among Americans under 50, largely thanks to a surge in opioid use. Although heroin and fentanyl have dominated the headlines in recent years, the problem started with a flood of prescription painkillers, distributed by some of the country’s biggest corporations.

    At the urging of his editor, Washington Post reporter Lenny Bernstein set out to learn why millions of pills were being sent to cities and towns across the U.S. – and why distributors seemed to shrug off evidence of rampant abuse. His reporting took him to Washington’s halls of power: the Department of Justice, Capitol Hill and deep inside the Drug Enforcement Administration, with a senior official who saw the crisis coming.

    #opioid #distributors #podcast #reveal

  • Why Saad Hariri Had That Strange Sojourn in Saudi Arabia - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/24/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-saad-hariri-mohammed-bin-salman-lebanon.html

    Pas de trève des confiseurs aux USA ! Etrange offensive médiatique contre MbS, le tout daté du 24 décembre.

    Dans cet article du NYT (pas fracassant) qui relate la détention de Hariri en Arabie saoudite :

    As bizarre as the episode was, it was just one chapter in the story of Prince Mohammed, the ambitious young heir apparent determined to shake up the power structure not just of his own country but of the entire region.

    Dans le Washington Post (où il est décrit comme “le prince de l’hypocrisiehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/saudi-arabias-crown-prince-of-hypocrisy/2017/12/24/b331025a-dc3f-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html:
    If he is truly interested in demonstrating enlightened and modern leadership, he should unlock the prison doors behind which he and his predecessors have unjustly jailed people of creativity, especially writers critical of the regime and intolerant religious hard-liners. Recently, he oversaw a crackdown that swept up influential clerics, activists, journalists and writers on vague charges of endangering national security. Allowing these voices to thrive and exist in the open would be a real contribution to the kind of society he says he wants. In particular, he should arrange an immediate pardon for blogger Raif Badawi, serving a 10-year jail sentence in the kingdom for the crime of free expression. Mr. Badawi offended hard-liners when he wrote that he longed for a more liberal Saudi society, saying, “Liberalism simply means, live and let live.”

    Opening Mr. Badawi’s cell door would do more to change Saudi Arabia than purchasing a fancy yacht and a villa in France.

    Et, Newsweek en remet une couche sur le Yémen notamment : But by far the biggest warning sign that Saudi Arabia is not ready to take human rights seriously is what it is doing in neighboring Yemen.

    “Earlier in November the U.N. warned that Yemen is on the brink of famine on a scale that the world has not seen in decades. This has been caused in no small part by the actions of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting in the country.

    Since early November, Saudi Arabia has tightened a blockade preventing nearly all food and life-saving aid from reaching an already starving and battered nation. An estimated 130 Yemeni children are dying every day, according to Save the Children.

    Though key access routes have since been reopened, there is little evidence that enough critically needed aid is being allowed in or guarantees that it will not be tightened again following the Huthis’ control of Sana’a. There certainly has been an uptick in air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition in December.

    All parties to the conflict have crimes to answer for, but in its fight against Huthi rebels in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has decided that the collective punishment of Yemeni civilians is an acceptable tactic in war. It is not.

    The Saudi Arabian authorities are not keen for the outside world to see how they are waging this war. Yet the pictures are starting to trickle out. It is these images, as well as those of the real reformers in Saudi Arabia who are languishing behind bars, that we should keep in mind next time we think about casually endorsing the new Crown Prince’s efforts to bring about reform.”

    Et Newsweek en remet une couche sur le Yémen notamment, sous le titre “Les nouveaux habits de l’emperuer” http://www.newsweek.com/saudi-arabia-and-emperors-new-clothes-758219 :
    But by far the biggest warning sign that Saudi Arabia is not ready to take human rights seriously is what it is doing in neighboring Yemen.

    Earlier in November the U.N. warned that Yemen is on the brink of famine on a scale that the world has not seen in decades. This has been caused in no small part by the actions of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting in the country.

    Since early November, Saudi Arabia has tightened a blockade preventing nearly all food and life-saving aid from reaching an already starving and battered nation. An estimated 130 Yemeni children are dying every day, according to Save the Children.

    Though key access routes have since been reopened, there is little evidence that enough critically needed aid is being allowed in or guarantees that it will not be tightened again following the Huthis’ control of Sana’a. There certainly has been an uptick in air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition in December.

    All parties to the conflict have crimes to answer for, but in its fight against Huthi rebels in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has decided that the collective punishment of Yemeni civilians is an acceptable tactic in war. It is not.

    The Saudi Arabian authorities are not keen for the outside world to see how they are waging this war. Yet the pictures are starting to trickle out. It is these images, as well as those of the real reformers in Saudi Arabia who are languishing behind bars, that we should keep in mind next time we think about casually endorsing the new Crown Prince’s efforts to bring about reform."

    #arabie_saoudite

  • U.S electricity generation by source: Natural gas vs coal - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/power-plants

    President Trump signed in March orders to reverse the previous administration’s energy policies, a move that he framed as “an end to the war on coal” and that comes amid a drop in the fuel’s use. Natural gas surpassed coal last year as the most common source for electricity generation in the United States, according to a Post analysis of preliminary data from the Energy Information Administration.

    #états-unis #énergie #électricité

  • Gender pay gap: the day women start working for free - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-pay-gap

    The median salary for women working full-time is about 80 percent of men’s. That gap, put in other terms, means women are working for free 10 weeks a year.
    So, if you’re a woman ...
    ... you started working for free a month ago

    #visualisation #inégalités #femmes

  • 50 years of U.S. mass shootings: The victims, sites, killers and weapons - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/mass-shootings-in-america

    he death tolls change, the places change: 26 at a church, 26 in an elementary school, 49 in a nightclub, 58 at a country music festival. The faces in the memorial photos change every time.

    But the weapons are the common denominator.

    Mass killings in the United States are most often carried out with guns, usually handguns, most of them obtained legally.

    There is no universally accepted definition of a mass shooting, and different organizations use different criteria. In this piece we use a narrow definition and look only at the deadliest mass shootings, beginning Aug. 1, 1966, when ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, then climbed a 27-story tower at the University of Texas and killed 14 more people before police shot him to death. The numbers here refer to 132 events in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (or two shooters in three cases). An average of eight people died during each event, often including the shooters.

    #armes #armement #états-unis #armes_légères #massacres

  • White supremacists are finding new homes on Russian social media; black transgender people face the more discrimination; the neo-Nazis at Daily Stormer want to make Papa John’s the official pizza of the alt-right, and more.
    https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/11/06/hatewatch-headlines-11617

    Daily Beast – Purged from Facebook and Twitter, white supremacists are seeking refuge on Russian social media, including VKontakte.
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/american-alt-right-leaves-facebook-for-russian-site-vkontakte

    Salon – The origins of the alt-right are not as new as many believe.
    https://www.salon.com/2017/11/05/what-are-the-origins-of-the-alt-right-hint-its-not-as-new-as-you-think

    Washington Post — Posters proclaiming “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE” have been appearing on college campuses and on city streets across the country.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/03/its-okay-to-be-white-signs-and-stickers-appear-on-campuses-and-stree

    NBC News — Black transgender people in the United States face “deeper and broader forms of discrimination” than their white counterparts.

    Raw Story — The white supremacist “Daily Stormer” wants to make Papa John’s the official pizza of the alt-right.

    CNN – The Daily Caller fires its opinion editor after he offers right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos a weekly column.

    Fox News — Miami art professor turns American flags into KKK hoods causing outrage.

    New York Times — An anti-immigrant group led by the white nationalist Richard Spencer has been told it can’t hold its annual conference in a federal office building, just blocks from the White House.

    Washington Post — Postcards targeting the school board candidates of Asian descent have been arriving in the mailboxes in Edison, New Jersey.

  • A look at Trump’s border wall prototypes - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/border-wall-prototypes

    A look at Trump’s
    border wall prototypes

    By Aaron Steckelberg, Chris Alcantara and Tracy Jan
    Oct. 31, 2017

    President Trump has preached his desire for a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border: Build it “big” and build it “beautiful,” with Mexico footing the bill.

    But Trump still does not have the funding from Congress, and Mexico has repeatedly said it will not pay for the wall. However, in this year’s budget, Congress has set aside $20 million for prototypes.

    Any wall design must meet the following requirements:

    #murs #frontières #mexique #états-unis #trump

  • Drug industry hired dozens of officials from the DEA as the agency tried to curb opioid abuse
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/key-officials-switch-sides-from-dea-to-pharmaceutical-industry/2016/12/22/55d2e938-c07b-11e6-b527-949c5893595e_story.html

    Pharmaceutical companies that manufacture or distribute highly addictive pain pills have hired dozens of officials from the top levels of the Drug Enforcement Administration during the past decade, according to a Washington Post investigation.

    The hires came after the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to curb a rising opioid epidemic that has resulted in thousands of overdose deaths each year. In 2005, the DEA began to crack down on companies that were distributing inordinate numbers of pills such as oxycodone to pain-management clinics and pharmacies around the country.

    Since then, the pharmaceutical companies and law firms that represent them have hired at least 42 officials from the DEA — 31 of them directly from the division responsible for regulating the industry, according to work histories compiled by The Post and interviews with current and former agency officials.

    #pharma #opiacés

    • Patent Monopolies Lead to #Corruption #54,358: The Case of Opioids | Beat the Press | Blogs | Publications | The Center for Economic and Policy Research
      http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/patent-monopolies-lead-to-corruption-54-358-the-case-of-opioids

      In the case of patent monopolies, the price can increase by a factor or ten or even a hundred, equivalent to a tariff of 1000 or 10,000 percent. The implied mark-ups provide an enormous incentive for companies to lobby to protect and enhance their markets. As the piece tells readers, “each 30-pill vial of oxycodone was worth $900.” If a 30-pill vial was selling for $30, there would have been much less incentive to lobby against legislation that would limit sales.

      For some reason patent monopolies and their role in maintaining high prices for opioids are never mentioned in this piece. It is probably worth mentioning that the Washington Post gets a substantial amount of advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical industry.

      #brevets #publicité

  • Corporate Media Analysts’ Indifference to US Journalists Facing 70 Years in Prison | FAIR
    http://fair.org/home/corporate-media-analysts-indifference-to-us-journalists-facing-70-years-in-pri

    For over two years, many in corporate media have been trumpeting the looming threat to a free press posed by Donald Trump. “Would President Trump Kill Freedom of the Press?” Slate (3/14/16) wondered in the midst of the primaries; after the election, the New York Times (1/13/17) warned of “Donald Trump’s Dangerous Attacks on the Press,” and the Atlantic (2/20/17) declared it “ A Dangerous Time for the Press and the Presidency.”

    It’s strange, then, that the attack on the press that kicked off the Trump administration—the arrest and subsequent threatening of two journalists with 70 years in prison—has been met with total silence from most of these same outlets. Aaron Cantú, Santa Fe Reporter staff writer and editor at the New Inquiry (and a contributor to FAIR.org), and professional photographer Alexei Wood are both facing decades in prison for the act of covering the January 20 unrest in DC—charged with felony rioting for little more than being in the proximity of window-breaking and brick-throwing. (Prosecutors initially brought and then dropped felony charges against six other reporters, though how their cases differ from Cantú and Wood’s is unclear.)

    ACLU lawyer Scott Michelman insists that these arrests “punish journalists for being near the action” and will “inevitably chill freedom of the press and, with it, First Amendment rights not only of the journalists themselves, but of all of us.”

    The three most influential media reporters in US media—CNN’s Brian Stelter, New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg and Washington Post’s Erik Wemple—have completely ignored the felony rioting charges leveled against the two #J20 journalists altogether. In their dozens of columns, reports, and on-air segments since the arrests nine months ago, neither Stelter nor Rutenberg nor Wemple has made a single mention of the reporters facing jail time.

    #MSM

  • When it comes to Facebook, Russia’s $100,000 is worth more than you think
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-it-comes-to-facebook-russias-100000-is-worth-more-than-you-think/2017/09/11/b6f8dde6-94c7-11e7-aace-04b862b2b3f3_story.html?tid=sm_tw

    As if we needed more evidence that Facebook influenced the election.

    Last week, the social-media company revealed that during the 2016 presidential campaign it sold more than $100,000 in ads to a Kremlin-linked “troll farm” seeking to influence U.S. voters. An additional $50,000 in ads also appear suspect but were less verifiably linked to the Russian government.

    In the grand — at this point, far too grand — scheme of campaign spending, $150,000 doesn’t sound like much. It’s a minor TV ad buy, perhaps, or a wardrobe makeover for one vice-presidential candidate. But in the context of Facebook, it matters quite a bit. Not just for what it might have done to the election but also for what it says about us.

    MAKE MARK ZUCKERBERG TESTIFY
    https://theintercept.com/2017/09/11/make-mark-zuckerberg-testify

    LAST WEEK, after what must have been a series of extremely grim meetings in Menlo Park, Facebook admitted publicly that part of its revenue includes what appears to be politically-motivated fraud undertaken by a shady Russian company. The social network, perhaps motivated by a Washington Post scoop on the matter, released a statement outlining the issues at hand, but leaving the most important questions unanswered. Only Facebook knows these answers, and we should assume they won’t be eager to volunteer them.

    After last week’s reports, Facebook received a round of emails and calls from reporters asking for clarifications on the many glaring gaps in the social network’s disclosure:

    What was the content of the Russian-backed ads in question?
    How many people saw these ads? How many people clicked them?
    What were the Facebook pages associated with the ads? How many members did they have?
    What specific targeting criteria (race, age, and most importantly, location) did the Russian ads choose?
    Given that Facebook reaches a little under 30% of the entire population of our planet, the answers to these questions matter.

  • Les corbeaux sont si malins qu’ils sabotent les expériences des chercheurs - Motherboard
    https://motherboard.vice.com/fr/article/d385zm/les-corbeaux-sont-si-malins-quils-sabotent-les-experiences-des-che

    Ce dernier m’a raconté une chose étonnante : au cours des expériences, un corbeau a compris prématurément le fonctionnement du système caillou/boite et a entrepris d’enseigner la méthode à ses congénères, avant d’inventer par lui-même une nouvelle façon d’obtenir la récompense. Au lieu de laisser tomber le caillou pour libérer la nourriture, la petite créature diabolique a déposé une couche de brindilles dans le tube et poussé un bâton à travers ladite couche afin d’enclencher le mécanisme.

    L’oiseau a dû être retiré de l’expérience avant qu’il apprenne aux autres corbeaux comment pirater le système des chercheurs.

    #éthologie #intelligence #animaux

  • Number of fatal shootings by police is nearly identical to last year - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/number-of-fatal-shootings-by-police-is-nearly-identical-to-last-year/2017/07/01/98726cc6-5b5f-11e7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html

    Police nationwide shot and killed 492 people in the first six months of this year, a number nearly identical to the count for the same period in each of the prior two years.

    Fatal shootings by police in 2017 have so closely tracked last year’s numbers that on June 16, the tally was the same. Although the number of unarmed people killed by police dropped slightly, the overall pace for 2017 through Friday was on track to approach 1,000 killed for a third year in a row.

    The Washington Post began tracking all fatal shootings by on-duty police in 2015 in the aftermath of the 2014 killing in Ferguson, Mo., of Michael Brown, who was unarmed and had an altercation with the officer who shot him. The ongoing Post project has documented twice as many shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 as ever recorded in a single year by the FBI’s tracking of such shootings, a pattern that is emerging again in 2017.

    Since Brown’s killing in Ferguson, other fatal shootings by police, many captured on video, have fueled protests and calls for reform. Some police chiefs have taken steps in their dep
    artments to reduce the number of fatal encounters, yet the overall numbers remain unchanged

    Police shootings 2017 database - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017

  • Grosse enquête du Washington Post qui, se basant sur sa connaissance approfondie de l’internet et de ses vagues d’indignation, expose enfin la pire saloperie commise par Trump depuis qu’il est Président : President Trump angers golf fans by driving golf cart on green. He apparently does this a lot.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/06/22/what-the-hell-trump-president-upsets-golf-fans-after-driving-cart-on

    It’s unclear whether Trump knew he was violating one of the unwritten (and actually, most of the time it is written down) rules of the game when he took to the course the weekend of June 9. But if he did realize his faux pas, he didn’t acknowledge it to the golf club patrons who caught him on tape.

    Trump rolled his golf cart off the green and right up to them, where he ended up complaining he was playing “well until this hole.” It’s unclear what hole Trump had just played, as well as how many he had already completed.

    This is not the first time Trump has been caught on camera driving on one of his golf course’s greens. According to Ken Bass, who said he’s a former member of Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., Trump regularly drives on the greens there. In early June at this course, which is located in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Trump reportedly drove on the green while playing with retired NFL quarterback Peyton Manning.

    Oui, il y a beaucoup de “it’s unclear”, mais beaucoup de citations de messages indignés de Twitter. Je pense qu’on peut enfin fermer l’internet. Et le Washington Post.

  • A Critical Problem | Cheryl Rofer
    https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/a-critical-problem

    The metal rods in the top photo are plutonium. Rods can roll. These rods could roll closer to each other and perhaps produce the kind of runaway neutron reaction that killed Slotin and Daghlian. Putting a hand in to separate them could make the reaction worse because the water in a human body reflects the neutrons.

    I had formal safety training, informal discussions with more experienced people, and made it a point to internalize rules of thumb. Keep pieces of plutonium separate. Abide by glovebox limitations; every glovebox has a sign with the limits of plutonium allowed in it. For solutions, keep them dilute and in flat containers. Flat/thin is safer; the closer a shape is to spherical, the less material is needed to go critical. IIRC, there were racks to put rods in if you were working with that shape of metal, so that they didn’t accidentally roll together.

    That photo is at the center of two articles from the Center for Public Integrity (NMPolitics.net, Washington Post). They are based on an investigation reported here. According to those articles, a technician ignored glovebox limits and arranged the plutonium to take that photo for management.

    #nucléaire #plutonium #YOLO

    (incident de 2011 désormais tout va bien)

    • Avec les deux versions de la folle #nuit_torride du 24 mai

      There are at least two narratives for how we got here. If you believe the government of Qatar, the official Qatar News Agency was hacked on May 24 and a fake news story was transmitted quoting Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani as saying, “There is no reason behind Arabs’ hostility to Iran.” The allegedly false report reaffirmed Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian offshoot, Hamas, as well as claiming Doha’s relations with Israel were good.

      The government-influenced media in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, adopted an alternative narrative, treating the news story as true and responding quickly with a burst of outrage. The emir’s comments were endlessly repeated and, to the anger of Doha, internet access to Qatari media was blocked so that the official denial could not be read.

      There is a possibility that the initial hacking was orchestrated by Tehran, which was annoyed by the anti-Iran posture of the May 20-21 summit in Riyadh, when President Donald Trump met King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud Salman and representatives of dozens of Muslim states.

    • Washington can play an important role in defusing this potentially explosive situation. U.S. officials may believe that Qatar was being less than evenhanded in its balancing act between the United States and Iran — but a drawn-out conflict between Riyadh and Doha, or a struggle that pushes Qatar into Tehran’s arms, would benefit no one. In this respect, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is arguably well-placed. ExxonMobil, where he was CEO before joining the U.S. government, is the biggest foreign player in Qatar’s energy sector, so he presumably knows the main decision-makers well.

    • Crise du Golfe : le Qatar a-t-il été piégé par les Emirats arabes unis ?
      http://www.latribune.fr/economie/international/crise-du-golfe-le-qatar-a-t-il-ete-piege-par-les-emirats-arabes-unis-74414

      Les Emirats arabes unis seraient à l’origine d’une cyberattaque visant les réseaux sociaux et les sites du gouvernement qatari fin mai, assurent plusieurs membres des renseignements américains interrogés par le Washington Post. Ces plateformes ont affiché de fausses déclarations attribuées à l’émir qatari, cheikh Tamin ben Hamad Khalifa Al-Thani, dans lesquelles il faisait l’éloge du Hamas et surtout de l’Iran, l’ennemi juré des pays du Golfe.

      L’opération s’est déroulée le 24 mai, soit peu de temps après la tournée du président américain Donald Trump dans les pays du Golfe. A cette occasion, l’Arabie saoudite et ses alliés n’ont pas manqué de rappeler qu’ils considéraient l’Iran comme un «  facteur de déstabilisation  » dans la région en raison de son «  interventionnisme  » dans plusieurs pays notamment la Syrie, l’Irak et le Yémen. Dans son discours à Riyad le 21 mai, Donald Trump a fait part du même diagnostic, appelant «  toutes les nations de conscience » à « travailler ensemble pour isoler l’Iran  ».

      Citant ces fausses déclarations de l’émir du Qatar, l’Arabie saoudite, les Emirats arabes unis, Bahreïn et l’Egypte ont interdit les médias qataris, puis imposé des sanctions diplomatiques dès le 5 juin. Doha a déjà averti ses voisins que ses plateformes avaient été piratées. Les Qataris ont d’ailleurs ouvert une enquête, toujours en cours, et n’ont pour l’instant désigné aucun coupable. De son côté, Abou Dabi réfute toute tentative de cyberattaque suite à l’article du Washington Post.

      Ces révélations surviennent alors que, depuis plusieurs mois, des e-mails hackés de l’ambassadeur des Emirats arabes unis à Washington et publiés par l’organisation pro-qatari GlobalLeaks, démontraient la détermination d’Abou Dabi de rallier les Etats-Unis à sa cause dans sa querelle avec Doha.

  • Washington Post didn’t disclose that writer who penned positive piece about Trump’s Saudi trip is paid by Saudi government - Salon.com
    http://www.salon.com/2017/05/27/wash-post-didnt-disclose-that-writer-who-penned-positive-piece-about-trumps-s

    The Washington Post allowed contributor Ed Rogers to praise Donald Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia without disclosing that he’s a lobbyist for the Saudi Royal Court. The Post has repeatedly allowed Rogers to promote his lobbying clients’ interests without disclosure.

    Rogers is the chairman of the BGR Group, a leading Washington, D.C., lobbying group. BGR is part of a vast network of American lobbying and public relations firms that work for the Saudi government. The Post itself has reported on Rogers’ role in promoting Saudi interests. An April 2016 article stated that Rogers “did not immediately return a request for comment” about his lobbying work for the Saudi government and that “Rogers is a contributor to the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog.”

    Rogers and BGR signed an agreement letter with the Saudi Royal Court on August 24, 2015, to “provide public relations and media management services for The Center [for Studies and Media Affairs at The Saudi Royal Court], which includes both traditional and social media forums.” The contract is worth $500,000 per year.

  • North Korean nuclear missile targets in the U.S.: Where might they strike? - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/north-korea-targets

    Experts assumed Kim Jong Un had the capability to launch nuclear weapons even before last weekend’s test flight of a new missile that, on a normal, flatter trajectory, would have been capable of reaching Guam. But they don’t think he wants to fire them randomly.

    [Here are the missiles North Korea just showed off, one by one.]

    “This notion that the program is unsophisticated is no longer true, and I don’t think the strategy is unsophisticated, either,” said Vipin Narang, an MIT professor who has written two books about nuclear strategy.

    #corée_du_nord #troisième_guerre_mondiale #it_has_begun

  • Here’s where D.C. public transit can take you — and who gets left behind - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/transit-access

    If you work near the White House, don’t have a car, and want to keep your commute under an hour, you could live in Gaithersburg, Md., or Reston, Va., both about 20 miles away.

    But you’d have trouble doing the same from just across the Anacostia River in neighborhoods near the southern tip of the District, roughly seven miles away, or from close-in areas of Prince George’s County.

    #cartographie #cartographie_isochrone #washington #états-unis

  • 20 million people are at risk of starving to death. Here’s how it got so bad. - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/2017-famines

    Our world produces enough food to feed all its inhabitants. When one region is suffering severe hunger, global humanitarian institutions, though often cash-strapped, are theoretically capable of transporting food and averting catastrophe.

    But this year, South Sudan slipped into famine, and Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen are each on the verge of their own. Famine now threatens 20 million people — more than at any time since World War II. As defined by the United Nations, famine occurs when a region’s daily hunger-related death rate exceeds 2 per 10,000 people.

    The persistence of such severe hunger, even in inhospitable climates, would be almost unthinkable without war.

    #famine #faim #conflit #cartographie